Happy Publication Day to Me, and My Co-Author Brock Wilbur and Our Awesome New Book Postal About the Most Hated Video Game and Filmmaker of All Time — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

I am overjoyed to report that today is the publication day for Postal, a book Brock Wilbur and I co-wrote for the good folks over at Boss Fight Books. This book has been a long time in the making. I mean a LONG time.

Our long, circuitous, tragicomic and sometimes downright fucked up journey to publication began a seeming eternity ago, back in the halcyon days of 2015, when an elegant, erudite and unflappable man of culture and education named Barack Obama led the free world and things didn’t seem anywhere near as apocalyptic as they do now.

Not long after I was laid off from The Dissolve in 2015 I was approached by the publisher of Boss Fight Books, who asked me if I was interested in writing a 33 1/3-style book about a video game. I hadn’t played video games in decades at that point but I found the prospect of writing about the video game movie Postal and its reviled creator Uwe Boll irresistible. So I asked my friend Brock Wilbur, a bona fide video game journalist, and one with IMPECCABLE ethics (seriously, he’s always talking to me about the need for ethics in video game journalism and it’s driving me CRAZY!) if he wanted to collaborate with me on a book about the movie and video game series Postal.

Collaborating with Brock was a stroke of genius. Not only were we compatible from a creative standpoint, with complementary writing styles and sensibilities but he has a solid video game background and was crazy enough to actually drive to Arizona to spend quality time with Vince Desi, the charismatic lunatic and bona fide awful person behind Postal.

He got amazing material out of the experience, giving our book a real gonzo/new journalistic flair and while I was very happy with the several hours I spent on the phone with Boll, there’s no substitute for meeting someone in the flesh, in letting the madness of the person you’re writing about mingle with your own.

Yes, it took five years to finish writing Postal, longer than any book I’ve ever written, although, truth be told, a fair amount of that time was spent procrastinating, and feeling terrible about procrastinating, and watching the many, many movies Uwe Boll made about angry young men who take out their frustrations with society via indiscriminate slaughter and writing about them, and then throwing that writing out and starting from scratch.

It was a goddamn psychodrama, is what it was. Every year the book got more and more personal as the world seemingly spun further and further out of control. In no small part due to the tacky lunatic in the White House, our world grows increasingly close to the the sick joke nightmare dystopia of Postal a little more each day.

Boll’s film is almost disconcertingly timely now, dealing as it does with a deadly virus, a looming apocalypse and President secretly conspiring with the head of our ostensible enemy.

I have devoted my career as an author and prolific pop culture columnist to articulating the worth and value of bands and movies and people our culture has collectively and definitively deemed worthless and also the worst, whether that’s movies like Ishtar in the My Year of Flops book or Insane Clown Posse in You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me and 7 Days in Ohio. I do the same for Uwe Boll and Postal here and while it may not turn you into a fan I think you’ll come away from the book thinking differently about Boll and the movie I think of as his masterpiece.

Postal takes you on a motherfucking journey, as me and Brock immerse ourselves in the kind of sordid sewer shit most folks wouldn’t think twice about but Brock and I have been contemplating and analyzing for literally years. Half a decade, in fact!

As The Weird Accordion to Al, My World of Flops, Nashville or Bust, You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like, the Spookthology of Terror and Travolta/Cage hopefully illustrate, when you invest yourself in an artist or an idea over a period years, with your whole heart, soul and mind, great things can come of it. You come to understand and appreciate something on a deep, enduing level, whether that’s country music or a filmmaker or hip hop duo widely considered the worst and most hated in the world.

So please do consider buying a copy of Postal on e-book or paperback. It’s from a real publisher in Boss Fight Books, so the formatting will be perfect for the e-book from day one and it will not fall upon me to mail your book to you, although, truth be told, I’ve come to enjoy that ritual, even in these scary times.

Yay! Books are fun. I am profoundly grateful that I get to write them, and with a co-author as amazing as Brock and a publisher like Boss Fight. Postal is an eminently worthy addition to your Nathan Rabin library, if I do say so myself.

Also, freelance writers, if you would like to take the occasion of me publishing two books in a short amount of time to write about them both, in tandem, I would be happy to help facilitate that. Just email me at nathanrabinauthor@gmail.com, and we will make the magic happen!

Help ensure a future for the Happy Place in an unhappy time by pledging at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace

AND of course you can, and should buy The Weird Accordion to Al, either at an independent bookseller, from me personally at nathanrabin@sbcglobal.net for twenty bucks (shipping included) or at Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Weird-Accordion-Al-Obsessively-Co-Author/dp/1658788478/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=weird+accordion&qid=1580693427&sr=8-1#customerReviews

Oh, and you can buy the kindle of Postal here https://www.amazon.com/Postal-Boss-Fight-Books-Book-ebook/dp/B0855T5SGB/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=%22postal%22+nathan+rabin&qid=1585866078&sr=8-2 and the paperback at https://bossfightbooks.com/products/postal-by-brock-wilbur-nathan-rabin